Cut Throat Dog by Joshua Sobol, Dalya Bilu Page A

fly like black cardboard cutouts againsta background of glaring gold, and the voice of the Alsatian sings a line from a song by Yves Montand with cheerful irony ‘
Et tout cela pour rien’
—and all this for nothing.
    God, how much we killed and were killed. So many lives were lost in order not to reach the place we’ve reached, and here we are at exactly the place where we didn’t want to be. And the lives that were lost are lost. We have to talk about it one day, Shakespeare. We have to sit over a bottle of Lagavulin one night and talk about it. Not Lagavulin. Its presence is too powerful, and it will take us straight to Islay, to that poor waiter, Bousidi, whose only crime was that he looked like the identical twin of the real Bousidi, and this resemblance cost him his life. So not Laphroaig and not Lagavulin and not Talisker. We’ll sit over a more neutral brand of whiskey. Calm. Without memories. Not from the Western Isles, whose soil is soaked in peat, but from the Highlands, from the heights of North Scotland. Balvenie, or Oban, or Glengoyne. Or perhaps from the lowlands, velvety triple distilled Auchentoshan. We’ll sit, you and I, and try to understand what it was, this Marathon, in which the streets are suddenly filled with crowds of runners, seventy thousand runners stampeding like herds, flooding and packing the squares and avenues to suffocation, spilling into the streets and alleys, a human tsunami flooding a city, the earth trembles from the thudding of the soles on the roads and the pavements, a hundred and forty thousand feet pounding the asphalt, and the shop windows and the facades of the buildings echo, and the air trembles with the sobbing of the desperate breathing of the lungs inhaling and exhaling two hundred and eighty thousand liters of air a second, and suddenly the last runners go past, and the race is over, the streets are empty, and a profound silence descends on the still city, and you stand there wondering: What was it, all that? Where did they come from? Where were they running to? What did they want? Where did theysuddenly disappear to? What the hell was it, this crazy story that was our lives—
    Where are we?

15
    Shakespeare’s voice interrupts the torrent of images flooding the cellars of Yadanuga’s consciousness, and Mona repeats the sentence, and directs it to a precise address:
    Moran, so where exactly are we?
    Well, says Moran, and turns to Hanina, before you went up to the roof—
    He knows what happened before he went up to the roof, Mona interrupts her and says in the commanding tone of a skipper: Tell him what happened when he wasn’t here.
    Moran takes a breath. Her nostrils flare and quiver. A beautiful mare about to break into a gallop, he says to himself, trying to banish Melissa, who wears reading glasses on her slits of eyes, which look as if they have just been bathed in tears, and who is reading to someone over the phone passages from a book with a yellow cover, which shows the photograph of a man with a bald head and a lifeless face in a tuxedo, embracing a naked young Thai girl.
    He asks himself why she needs this book for the pervert on the other end of the line, since there is nothing new about the description she is reading him. He has no doubt of her ability to successfully improvise a text of the same kind, full of names for the male and female sexual organs and tediously banal descriptions of what happens to them in the act of sexual intercourse. Apparently she prefers to read these things from a text written by someone else, a translation of some French novel, since this frees her from the need to search for words or to involve herself in the drearytransaction taking the place of real intimacy. He looks at her through the open bathroom door and sees her contemptuously deceiving her customer, who is fully aware of the deceit, but at this moment, in some kennel of loneliness, in one of the tens of thousands of cells of human habitation in this city